Sunday, January 09, 2011

Little Robots (and animated GIFs!)

A "Happy 2011!" is probably in order, but there's another reason to celebrate: This is the 300th post over here at Drip!

So, I've called in these little robots to kick off the festivities. I actually thought I lost them when my hard drive crashed last summer, but was able to retrieve them. They are from a project I did a year ago for my pal Tim McCandless over at Bandolier Group. I designed and animated a bunch of little robots to go along with a flow chart. Most are in a panic, until they discover the new and easy way to fulfill rewards and rebates. I'm not sure how we settled on robots...

Here's a quick way to view the animations (requires Flash):

--> Robot Animations(look for the gray dot in the top left to toggle between 2 screens.)

Because I've been on an "animated.gif kick", I worked feverishly for more than a few hours today, converting a handful of these Flash animations into self-contained looping gifs. Whether it interests you or not, the challenge being that most of these robots were built with nested movieclips. If you know Flash, when it ain't a .swf, you need to turn all your movieclips into graphics. (UGH.) But I accomplished it, diving into one movieclip after another, and calculated mathematical things like Least Common Multiples to get them to loop properly.

Now that I've delayed (and bored) you by reading, most of these buggers should've loaded! So, let the party begin!